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Long before billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel dreamed up the idea of a floating libertarian island nation, a 24-year-old Yale grad student named Jason Sorens proposed a far more down-to-earth experiment for those who wanted to live the limited government lifestyle: that a critical mass of "freedom-loving people... establish residence in a small state and take over the state government." The "Free State Project" call to action was in 2001. By 2003, five thousand people agreed to take part and they held a vote to decide which low-population state would be the staging ground for the libertarianvasion, which would be triggered when 20,000 people signed on. New Hampshire (population: 1.3 million) won -- narrowly beating out Wyoming (population: 576,000) -- and early movers began trickling in to help the state fully realize its "Live Free or Die" motto.

Thirteen years later, there are over 2,000 Free Staters scattered around New Hampshire and the petition is now 4,000 signatures short of triggering the full move. The concentration of Free Staters is highest in New Hampshire twice a year, during the group's two annual gatherings: a Bacchanalian free-market festival called "PorcFest" which is held in the woods in the summertime and an academic-spirited conference called the Liberty Forum, held at a hotel in the wintertime. I was invited to snowy New Hampshire this February to speak at the latter because Free Staters were interested in two things I write about: Bitcoin and corporate privacy practices. I discovered that this isolated group has fully adopted Bitcoin, and that it's extremely enthusiastic about other "freedom-enhancing" technologies such as 3D-printers and encryption. Everyone I met in the Project owned Bitcoin and was willing to accept it for goods and services. Of the couple thousand people living there, at least seven own 3D-printers. Though the idea originally was to get a critical mass to influence the political process, many in the movement now feel that the freedoms they want may be better realized through technology that routes around the government rather than engaging it directly.

When I arrived at the airport, the organizers had arranged for me to be picked up by a Bitcoin-accepting driver in a winter-assaulted red Prius. I buckled up but my driver, Riaz, simply ignored the car's annoying, insistent beep that he put his seatbelt on until it finally stopped. New Hampshire is the only state without a mandatory seatbelt law, and the Free Staters will do their best to keep it that way. Riaz had moved from Orlando six months earlier, led to the movement through his support of the libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul. "It’s amazing here, living with all of these people who hold the same beliefs as you," he says. "We want to push back against bad laws, decriminalize marijuana, push for more liberal gun and knife laws, keep a ban on license plate readers. We want to eliminate regulations, taxes and licenses. Within our community a lot of us ignore that, and so we only work with other Free Staters." While not all Free Staters are flouting the law, if one is ignoring regulations and taxes, Bitcoin is a good currency to do it in, as there's no need to set up an account with a bank which entails paperwork and financial monitoring.

Erik Voorhees, a Bitcoin entrepreneur who recently made headlines for settling a suit with the SEC over selling shares in Bitcoin businesses for Bitcoin, moved to New Hampshire in May 2011 to join the Free State Project. It was there that he first heard about Bitcoin after someone posted about it in the Free State Facebook group. "Very few Free Staters knew about about it at that point. They don't like using government money, but they were more into gold and silver than virtual currency," he says. "I went down the rabbit hole and couldn’t stop talking about it, and then warmed other Free Staters up to it." Voorhees notes that Roger Ver, a Bitcoin entrepreneur who lives in Tokyo, was also an early signer of the Free State petition, and bought Bitcoin ads on Free Talk Live, a libertarian radio station associated with the project.

Actual gold dollars, along with silver coins -- in the background -- are still in circulation in the Free State Project, along with Bitcoin

Nine months after moving to New Hampshire, Voorhees moved to New York to go work for BitInstant, an early Bitcoin exchange that's since shut down, its founder facing criminal charges, but other Free Staters took on the Bitcoin mantle. Zach and Josh Harvey moved to New Hampshire from Israel in 2011 to join the Free State Project, frustrated by the "bureaucracy and regulation in Tel Aviv." They decided to start a Bitcoin ATM company called Lamassu that's now sold hundreds of the machines around the world. A Lamassu Bitcoin ATM was heavily used at the Liberty Forum, but no one has set one up permanently in New Hampshire yet, says Harvey.

Bitcoin ATM in use at the Liberty Forum. Photo by Virgil Vaduva.

"Most people in the Free State Project are technology-oriented, and many come from a programming or computer background. The libertarian way of thinking is pretty common among technologists," says Lamassu's Zach Harvey, 35. "They want to teach themselves as much as they can in order to be free, and you have to use technology these days to be free. Bitcoin is the perfect fit for this group, a government-free currency with freedom programmed in."

When I got to the Crowne Plaza in Nashua where the Forum was held, I started seeing a significant number of handguns; this group is strongly in support of the Second Amendment. "The first year they came to the hotel we were scared. I saw a guy carrying a baby wearing a machete on one hip and a gun on the other," said a manicurist in the hotel salon. "We know people can carry guns but hadn’t seen people so openly doing it before." I also saw my first 3D-printed gun that weekend. A member of the Free State movement, Bill Domenico, printed the second-ever Liberator after Defense Distributed's Cody Wilson first made it a reality in Texas last year. Domenico, an electrical engineer, has lived in New Hampshire for 30 years, and joined the Free State Project in 2008. He has a 3D printer that he built himself as well as a commercial one. He has printed two guns with it so far, but only for himself. "It would be illegal for me to print guns for other people," he says. "I haven't used it heavily beyond that. Lately, I've been making memorabilia for PorcFest: Liberator earrings and porcupine trinkets."

Bill Domenico with his 3D printer

The porcupine is the mascot of the Free State movement. "It's a cute creature until you step on it," explained one Free Stater.

Domenico's 3D-printed guns

At the Liberty Forum, Bill Domenico, gray-haired and glasses-wearing, introduces Cody Wilson, bearded, wearing a puffy vest and a wrist cast, for a talk on building the Liberator. Wilson, a 26-year-old law school drop-out who lives in Austin, is a rock star here, for both creating a way to distribute guns that's outside of government control and for his work on Dark Wallet, a Bitcoin service that is supposed to make the digital currency less traceable, and thus, again, freer from government control. Wilson talks about being scared the first time he shot the Liberator after having been warned for months A Christmas Story-style that "he would shoot his eye out," and about the Arms Control Export Act and being contacted by the State Department to take down the blueprints for the Liberator. "We live in a state of unfreedom," he says to a very sympathetic audience.

When I speak to Wilson months later by phone, he compares the Free State Project in New Hampshire with Silicon Valley; both places have libertarian-leaning techies trying to make disruptive technologies popular. "Silicon Valley is more capitalized and less about practical liberty than the Free State community, which has a better stake in the freedom at the heart of these technologies," he says. "It’s the hotbed of libertarian activism in the country."

Non-Free State New Hampshire has certainly noticed. A local politician called the movement "the single greatest threat" to the state. When the city of Concord applied for a $250,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security for an armored military vehicle, it explained that it needed it for the domestic terrorist threat represented by "Sovereign Citizens, Free Staters and Occupy New Hampshire." Despite a protest of the Bearcat and war gear flowing to local police departments across the country, Concord will get one this summer, according to its police department.

Bill Domenico says another popular technology within the movement is the "Green Beam," a laser projector he built for campaigning for Ron Paul that now gets used to warn people about police checkpoints or to stage public protests, as when "Bearcat Equals Tyranny" and "City Council Sucks" were projected on a building in Concord. It's the evolution of protest signage, but an evolution that must take place at night.

The nearby college town of Keene got an armored Bearcat more than a year ago. Keene has attracted Free State's more radical element, such as the Robin Hooders, who follow meter maids around and put coins in expired parking meters to deprive the government of the revenue it would otherwise get from parking tickets. "They are not just skeptical that the current government can work," wrote Dave Weigel about the "Free Keene" branch of the Free State Project in Slate in 2011. "They think government can never work."

Many Free Staters are advocates of equalizing surveillance. Robin Hooders often film their parking-protection activity and especially their interactions with police. “We’re in a different age, a post-privacy reality. If you’re outside, you can be documented,” said one Robin Hooder at the Liberty Forum. “Cameras are like guns. It’s not good that the government has guns. But it’s good we have them as an equalizer.” Carla Gericke, president of the Free State Project, which is the organizing committee that helps get people to New Hampshire, recently won a lawsuit against the city of Weare, New Hampshire for charging her with wiretapping for filming police officers during a traffic stop. She was awarded $57,000 dollars.

While there's discussion at the Liberty Forum of decentralized mesh-networking for Internet service and "counterveillance" through encryption and Tor, the talk is mainly aspirational; those technologies don't seem heavily used by the group yet. There's literacy but not adoption. "The Tor browser is slow. Encryption tools are clunky," says Darren Tapp, a technologist who works for a company called "SnoopWall," a service that prevents your smartphone from being turned into a spying device. "Being a tech savvy group, they know about and can access those tools. Once they’re very convenient, I think they’ll be in widespread use here."

Most of the community organizing is still done through the not-especially-privacy-enhancing platform that is Facebook. "We’re a pretty big movement, so we have the techies who know all and are early adopters of everything, and then people like me who are newbies," says Gericke, a bubbly, black-haired woman who moved to New Hampshire in 2008. For all her talk of not being an early adopter, she bought her first Bitcoin when it was worth $6. (Most people didn't hear of it until years when it was worth 100 times that.) Gericke says the Free State Project doesn't try to push any particular technologies on the group, that tech adoption is organic. "I call my job herding cats," she says. "It’s a challenge dealing with people who are individualists above and beyond anything else. For the most part, we have people working within the system – running for office, getting on school boards, working on budgets. Others are protesters. Others are free marketeers, starting businesses. It’s not an issue of saying one way is right and one way is wrong. There are many paths to liberty."

Adam Sloan, of BirdsEyeView Aerobotics, with the shadow of one of his drones

Of course, technology is complicated: something freeing can also be oppressive. Adam Sloan, who moved from Gainesville, Florida, to New Hampshire in 2010 to join the Free Staters, has been disappointed at the reception of his technology business: BirdsEyeView Aerobotics, a company he founded in 2012 that makes 5-foot wide, 8-pound drones, though he prefers to call them "aerobots." "The liberty movement isn’t that friendly toward drones, because of the military and surveillance use by government. I've lost friends in the Free State Project because of it," he says. "Drones are what brought me to the liberty message, ironically."

Sloan was frustrated by government regulation around development of drone technology in the U.S. "It felt like the FAA was trying to strangle it to death, and make government the only potential customer," he says. He was hoping the community would be excited about potential uses of drones for activism, reverse surveillance, and delivery services -- it's a private alternative to post offices, a use Amazon's Jeff Bezos hopes to embrace. "They’re a powerful tool to watch the watchmen. I think that there are parallels between the gun argument and the drone argument," says Sloan. "It’s a technology that’s threatening to some people, but there’s no reason that only government should have access to it."

Jason Sorens, with family, at the Liberty Forum, via Judd Weiss

Jason Sorens, the grad student who started it all, is now a floppy-haired, youthful-looking university professor at Dartmouth. The 38-year-old only moved to New Hampshire with his wife and child a year ago, in 2013. “It was difficult to find an academic job in New Hampshire," he explains. "It was definitely one of the things critics leveraged at the movement: 'Even your founder hasn’t moved.'"

Sorens still hopes the movement can influence the political climate in New Hampshire through voting and lobbying. But he does see technology as central to movement in that it wouldn’t have worked before the Internet. "The whole concept of 'I’ll move if you do' only works if you exert global peer pressure. There's lots of digital recruiting, exchange of ideas and meeting online," he says. “The biggest source of recruits used to be Free Talk Live, a libertarian radio station. Now it’s Facebook and Twitter."

“We believe in privacy and civil liberties," says Sorens. "The idea that we are a potential terrorist group is absurd.”